Group Leaders

Janelia group leaders are independent scientists who direct a team of researchers. Group leaders are at all career stages, ranging from those who have just completed their PhD to more senior scientists, similar to HHMI investigators.

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Group Leaders

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Janelia group leaders are independent scientists who direct a team of researchers. Group leaders are at all career stages, ranging from those who have just completed their PhD to more senior scientists, similar to HHMI investigators.

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Explore these pages to find out how our group leaders and their labs embody Janelia’s intellectual creativity. A complete list of our labs can be found on the main research page.

We develop new machine vision and learning technologies to extract scientific understanding from large image data sets. Using these systems, we aim to gain insight into behavior and how it is generated by the nervous system.

We use molecular genetic techniques to study the function of neural circuits in Drosophila. Our goal is to understand how information processing in defined neural circuits generates complex animal behaviours. As a model system, we focus on the fly’s mating behaviours. These behaviours are robust, adaptive, and particularly amenable to genetic analysis.

Voluntary, purposive behavior requires that we extract information about the world, formulate plans for action, and then execute the movements required to bring about desired outcomes. Our lab studies a critical nexus in the mammalian brain where sensory information and motor planning come together to subserve volition - the basal ganglia.

Our laboratory studies the structures of membrane proteins important in homeostasis and signaling. We develop new tools in structural biology, namely MicroED as a new method for cryo EM, to facilitate the study of such membrane proteins to atomic resolution from vanishingly small crystals.

We are interested in understanding what neural computations allow animals to dynamically adjust their behavior according to the structure and demands of the environment and how these circuit mechanisms are perturbed in neuropsychiatric disorders.

To survive and reproduce in an ever-changing environment, animals need to be able to modulate their behaviour upon experience. We seek to understand this process of learning and memory by studying a specific form of behavioural plasticity in Drosophila at the molecular, cellular, and circuit levels.

Our goal is to understand the principles underlying the formation of the nervous system. We use light-sheet microscopy and computer vision to quantitatively study development and emergence of function in the early nervous system of fruit fly, zebrafish and mouse.

How does an animal learn, store, and recall specific items and events? We study spatial learning in rats and mice with a focus on the hippocampus, which has been shown to be a critical brain area underlying spatial behavior and memory.

We are keen to determine the cellular complexity of the brain, to elucidate how numerous distinct neurons can derive from a limited number of progenitors, and to possibly reengineer the brain for understanding its structure, function and evolution.

The animal body is made up of a spectrum of cell types that are "neatly" organized to form functional organs. Using advanced optical and genomic tools, we devise new strategies to quantitatively understand such cell-type diversity at the molecular level.

Loren Looger uses protein engineering to create tools – including neurotransmitter detectors, improved labels for in vivo imaging, designed receptors, and rewired neural circuits – to study the brain. His lab will combine computational and evolutionary methods to create new reagents to characterize and manipulate the assembly and function of neural circuits.

Marius Pachitariu's work is to understand how detailed high-dimensional patterns of neural activity encode the animal’s perception of the external world, and how those percepts are combined with pre-existing internal biases and learnt properties of the world to generate flexible behavior.

We seek to understand how brains transform sensory information and past experience into diverse behaviors. We use behavioral, imaging, electrophysiological, and computational techniques to crack the neural circuits that support vision and navigation in Drosophila.

We want to establish the mechanisms by which microcircuits in the hippocampus and cortex encode, maintain and dynamically update information, and relate these to phenomena expressed at the level of behavior.

The Schreiter lab is currently developing tools for permanently marking and selectively manipulating populations of active neurons in model organisms. These tools will bridge anatomy and function for dissection of neuronal circuits.

Neurons and glia are the engines of the brain. They are visually striking, functionally sophisticated, and diverse. They perform computations that are ultimately responsible for everything we think and do. We want to understand how they work.

How does animal behavior evolve? Which genes have evolved to generate behavioral diversity? How have these genes changed? How do these genes alter neural circuit architecture or physiology? These are the questions that motivate the lab.

We are interested in the origin of our most fundamental motivations – behaviors that are physiologically imperative for survival. Our lab combines advanced molecular and systems neuroscience approaches in order to understand the neurobiology of survival needs such as hunger and thirst.

Neurons in the cerebral cortex and connected brain areas produce patterns of activity that are related to processing of information. These activity patterns resemble tunes, each with its own melody, timbre and rhythm. Neurons and their tunes organize into orchestras which ultimately produce our perception of the world and our actions within it. We want to understand how large collections of cortical neurons organize dynamically to process information and produce behavior.

How does the brain extract information about sensory stimuli? How is this information utilized to guide behavior and to form memories? We address these questions in the appealingly simple nervous system of the fruitfly, where we focus on olfactory processing.

Inside Our Labs

By design, Janelia group leaders have time to focus their energy and creativity on research. All our labs are internally funded at levels sufficient to pursue an ambitious research program, with access to unparalleled scientific and technical facilities. The absence of teaching, fundraising, and administrative responsibilities allows group leaders to devote the vast majority of their time to a transformative research program that might be difficult to pursue elsewhere.

Group size is limited in order to encourage focus on high-impact research. This also enables hands-on research by the group leaders and interaction between labs. Even our senior group leaders can be found in the lab more often than in the office. Early-career group leaders have a minimum of two lab members (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, or technical staff), while more senior group leaders have up to six lab members. These small teams all enjoy a “big science” boost from the generous support provided by shared research resources. These are large groups of professional staff encompassing a range of research areas, which considerably increase the capabilities of each lab by centralizing both routine and sophisticated lab functions. Additional research opportunities are offered by the Visitor Program and Project Teams.

Program Details

Janelia is the place to carry out your “dream experiment.” We bet millions of dollars of resources on you, and you get the opportunity to do bold and potentially transformative research. Janelia group leaders have initial appointments of seven years that can be renewed. Our review process considers not simply the importance of publishing your work when it’s ready, but also the unpublished progress you’ve made toward developing a research program that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere.

Our early-career group leaders are supported by both internal and external mentoring programs to help them establish an independent research program that may be continued at Janelia or elsewhere. Successful review of established group leaders can also include the ability for the group leader to transfer his or her appointment as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator to a research university in the United States.

At Janelia, we value collaboration. Full internal funding and small labs translate into time to interact not only with members of your group but also with your colleagues. Thus, it is common to see a group leader discussing results with a postdoc from another lab over coffee in Bob’s Pub. We also place a high value on collegiality. We expect group leaders to make a positive contribution to the overall scientific environment at Janelia.

Who Are We Looking For?

We’re looking for group leaders with a vision and a passion for research. Group leaders are recruited from a range of career stages and disciplines, including biology, chemistry, computer science, physics, and engineering.

Our search paradigm is simple. To be a strong candidate at Janelia, you should identify an important problem, clearly articulate how solving the problem will have a large impact on the field, and present a plausible strategy for solving that problem. Such a strategy will almost always be bold and will often be risky.

In the biological sciences incremental progress can be valuable, and there are many good examples of fields that have progressed through a series of incremental advances. This model will no doubt continue to be the predominant paradigm in biology. Occasionally, however, an individual or a team tries a new approach or develops a new method that catapults the field forward. At Janelia, we place a high value on people who are willing to try something new in an effort to achieve this kind of transformational advance.

We judge our group leaders almost entirely on their potential to transform their field. Many of our group leaders have nontraditional backgrounds (e.g., starting their Janelia lab straight out of graduate school, after working in industry, or even after a hiatus from science altogether). If you are a traditional candidate (e.g. a postdoc) and you find yourself sending the same application to Janelia that you are sending to other places, you should stop to think: if funding were not an issue and you could have unqualified support to pursue the boldest vision you could imagine, what would you really do? Share your vision, and we will take notice.

Transforming a field often takes the form of developing a new technique or approaching a problem in an entirely novel way. In many cases, this means taking on considerable risk. What if your strategy doesn’t work or takes longer than expected? Bold research projects can be evaluated for their progress, even independently of publication. Our group leaders get good advice, from both internal and external mentors, on when it makes sense to keep pushing along the same path or to switch directions. We provide safety nets, such as transitional funding that you can take elsewhere if you leave Janelia, as well as leaders who are willing to support a research program with a compelling vision, even when the inevitable obstacles emerge.

Science is about the thrill of discovery. Janelia was modeled after respected institutions with track records for producing disproportional impact and breakthroughs. We offer you a chance to help us dramatically advance science by enabling your most ambitious research goals.

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Apply

We accept continuous applications for group leaders.

We invite applications from biochemists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, geneticists, mathematicians, neurobiologists, physicists and statisticians at an early career stages who are passionate in their pursuit of important problems in basic scientific and technical research.

Inside Look: Lab Heads

Janelia's lab heads come from some of the world’s top research laboratories. They bring their best ideas, unbridled enthusiasm, and eagerness to collaborate and learn. At Janelia, they can focus on research with minimal administrative responsibilities.

“Here it really is full autonomy, with a level of funding and freedom that maybe there are one or two other places in the world that would provide that. There's no strings attached. No one's telling me what to do. And the autonomy is real.”

“Sometimes I do feel like a detective... It's very exciting. In the process, there's lots of instinct involved. You're trying to develop a tool – a research technique – that doesn't exist. You want to see that by making this thing into a reality whether you can see something that cannot be seen before.”

“Interacting across labs always comes with the ability to share perspective and often to share a different perspective that our lab takes on a certain technique or a certain question. And I think that's something that's much harder to achieve when it's contained within a single lab.”